The music of innovation: Lim Ming En’s journey from Associate to Data Scientist

Lim Ming En's career journey at HTX from Associate to Data Scientist shows great determination and drive.

Ming En

(Photo: Lim Ming En)

Back in 2016, when he was deciding what to study at the National University of Singapore, Lim Ming En – like many undergraduates – made his decision based on what he was good at. He was strong in math and physics, and so he naturally gravitated towards engineering. In his third year, he decided to specialise in computational engineering science due to the big shift in the job market towards software engineering, and this brought him to the path that would eventually lead him to HTX.

As his advisor for his final year project was Dr Ng Gee Wah – who is also the Director of HTX’s Q Team – he didn’t hesitate when Dr Ng suggested that he apply to HTX upon graduation. It also helped that he had also worked with Dr Terence Tan – a deputy director at Q Team – for his final year project. In addition, as the COVID-19 pandemic had just erupted worldwide at the time, the job stability of the public sector was foremost on his mind.

Ming En’s passion for science and technology stems from his thinking style. As he explains, “I’m a very logical person so to me STEM work is essentially one big puzzle that needs to be carefully resolved one step at a time. It’s also mentally stimulating which perfectly ties in with my love for challenges as well.”

His delight with puzzles extends into his personal life, where he enjoys playing puzzle games as well as multiplayer first-person shooters like Valorant and Apex Legends with his friends. (His dream is to create his own video game which will be a combination of a puzzle game and a first person shooter.)

He also enjoys the beautiful harmonies and rhythms of classical music. A trained saxophonist since his secondary school and junior college days, he enjoys jazz but prefers the warm and round notes of the classical saxophone. The Studio Ghibli movie scores of Joe Hisaishi constitute a large portion of his work and study soundtrack, and he would have been listening to these – along with his favourite Mandopop songs – when he was coding his AI Bot for FISOPS – one of his projects in his first two years an HTX Associate.

Hitherto, if you were an SCDF officer processing fire and safety storage applications, you would have to manually check each application to make sure all the required documents had been submitted and named correctly. Ming En’s AI Bot automated this process by using text and image analytics to check the attached documents for each application. This greatly streamlined the Fire and Safety Online Processing System (FISOPS) process, and the project won the Minister for Home Affairs Operational Excellence (OE) Award in 2021.

The OE Award was his proudest moment as an Associate, as this confirmed for him that his work “had an actual impact on the Home Team.” This confirmation underscored the meaningful nature of his work at HTX:

“After two years of working at HTX, I realised that knowing that what I do is helping Singapore actually gives me motivation and the drive to continue to go to work day after day. This reflection was honestly really surprising to me since I’m not particularly patriotic as at the start of my career my main goal was to make money to settle down and start a family.”

Finding your optimum learning ‘groove’ is crucial to ensuring that you maximise the time and energy you have to learn new things.

Ming En is being extremely modest here, as he had already demonstrated great motivation and drive even before he had won the OE Award. When he first decided to take on the challenge of solving the FISOPS puzzle, he had no knowledge of image analysis and text classification. This meant that even before he could start building his AI Bot, he first had to learn new skills including optical character recognition (OCR), image recognition, and object detection. Only when he gained these new skills was he able to develop an effective approach to streamline the FISOPS process workflow.

Ming En 2
Ming En presenting the AI bot for FISOPS to Permanent Secretary Pang Kin Keong at HTX’s inaugural TechXplore. (Photo: HTX)

Another project which he built – this time in collaboration with GovTech – was a phishing email classifier for JEDI – the JAGA Email Digital Inquisitor – a tool which helps security analysts investigate emails which have been reported as phishing attempts. The classifier uses Machine Learning (ML) techniques to classify elements in the suspected phishing email such as the target URLs and types of file attachments (for example, PDFs and MS Office files). As with his AI Bot, he first had to learn anti-phishing cybersecurity techniques before he was able to begin coding the classifier.

After his two-year stint as an Associate was over, Ming En decided to continue working at HTX, and is currently a Data Scientist with xData in the Enterprise Group. One notable project which he recently worked on was the update of NEMO, a horizon scanning and sense-making tool that is available on the Government Commercial Cloud (GCC). The original NEMO system used deep learning techniques to identify relevant content for users; his improvements helped NEMO achieve better accuracy, and it has since been onboarded on GCC 2.0 where it can be accessed via intranet by public officers. To build the update, he first had to study advanced ML techniques as well as the cloud technologies of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Apart from his technical work at HTX, he is also active with HTX’s non-technical activities. He sits on various planning committees for events such as the recent TechXplore 5 and the Data & Analytics Community of Practice, and also serves as an emcee for eXpresso!, HTX’s bimonthly town hall. Tan Boon Howe, Deputy Director (Engagement), Strategic Communications, shared that Ming En readily learned the ropes of emceeing when he joined the eXpresso! team:

“He joined us as a member of the eXpresso! team in early Feb 2021 and even though he had no prior experience, he gamely agreed to the emcee for eXpresso! just two weeks later. He is very receptive to feedback and adapts quickly to the suggestions made to the script during rehearsals and has quickly established himself as a reliable emcee.”

To successfully juggle work, life, and study, Ming En recommends surrounding yourself with supportive people with whom you can share and discuss new ideas:

“I would stress on the importance of surrounding oneself with like-minded people with a positive learning attitude. Talking about ideas and concepts forces you to slow down and refine your thoughts. This will subsequently compound your own mindset and serve as fuel when one inevitably hits a rough patch in one’s learning journey.”

He also advises taking breaks. Apart from Valorant and Apex Legends, you may also find him working out at the gym or reading a non-fiction book like George Yeo’s Musings. For family vacations he enjoys cities with world-class service cultures like Tokyo and Kyoto. He says:

“Personally, I feel that the break time is just as important, if not more, than the study time. Finding your optimum learning ‘groove’ is crucial to ensuring that you maximise the time and energy you have to learn new things.”

In recognition of his application of lifelong learning to create practical improvements for the Home Team, he received the Exemplary SkillsFuture @ Public Service Award at the Public Sector Transformation Awards 2023, which recognises public officers who embody the spirit of continuous and lifelong learning.

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